Black Hole Movies, Digital Heart Twins, and World Cup Tech (EP 48)

July 14, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

The Event Horizon Telescope has been watching the same supermassive black hole for seven years, and it has finally released a movie. The black hole is M87*, 55 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo. The video shows the accretion disk’s magnetic field lines shifting and even flipping over time, revealing a system far more dynamic than most objects in astronomy. That discovery is one of four stories in this rundown episode of From First Principles, which also covers a personalized digital twin for heart surgery, a new full-body ultrasound scanner from the company behind Midjourney, and two World Cup controversies involving ball-tracking sensors and referee bias.

A Munchkin on the Moon: Imaging a Black Hole in Motion

The 2019 image of M87* looked like a glazed donut. To understand the scale of that achievement, the hosts offer a vivid comparison: if you took a Dunkin’ Donuts Munchkin and placed it on the moon, that is how big that donut appears in the sky. The angular resolution required is about 40 micro-arcseconds. A single arcsecond is 1/3600th of a degree; a micro-arcsecond is a millionth of that. To resolve such a tiny object using radio waves at 1.3 millimeters wavelength, physics demands a telescope the size of the Earth.

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What you'll learn

1 Timestamped Outline
2 (00:00) **Episode Intro & Sponsor** - Accenture/Spotify ad and episode preview of four stories: black hole magnetic reversal, digital heart twin, ultrasonic CT scanner, and two World Cup follow-ups.
3 (02:49) **M87 Black Hole: From Theory to First Image** - Setting up the significance of the Event Horizon Telescope's 2019 photograph and the seven-year journey to create a time-lapse movie of a supermassive black hole.
4 (13:55) **The Insane Scale of Resolution** - Explaining just how small these black hole images are in the night sky and what that means for the technology required.
5 (23:04) **Earth-Sized Telescope: Radio Interferometry** - How the Event Horizon Telescope network achieves Earth-scale resolution without building a Dyson sphere.
6 (35:51) **The Six-Year Movie of M87's Magnetic Field** - The new time-lapse video revealing the black hole's dynamic behavior and magnetic field reversals over half a decade.
7 (40:43) **Digital Heart Twin for Ventricular Tachycardia** - Johns Hopkins researchers create personalized 3D computer simulations of patients' hearts to guide catheter ablation surgery.

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary, this episode returns to the FFP science rundown with stories spanning astrophysics, precision medicine, medical imaging, artificial intelligence, and World Cup technology.

We begin with the Event Horizon Telescope and its evolving view of M87*, the supermassive black hole 55 million light-years away. How do you image something that appears about as small as a donut on the Moon? Krishna explains angular resolution, the Rayleigh limit, radio interferometry, and how telescopes across Earth can function like one planet-sized instrument. We then look at new observations showing the magnetic field around M87* changing over time—and why that may help explain black-hole jets and the mysterious shutdown of star formation in giant elliptical galaxies.

Next, we turn to medicine. Researchers at Johns Hopkins have built personalized digital twins of patients’ hearts, allowing doctors to simulate ventricular-tachycardia treatments before entering the operating room. We break down how MRI data, electrical modeling, and virtual ablation could reduce procedures from hours to roughly 30 minutes. We also examine Midjourney Medical’s proposed whole-body ultrasound scanner: what the prototype appears to do, what its creators are claiming, and why it should be viewed as a potential addition to the medical-imaging toolbox rather than a replacement for MRI.

Finally, we return to the World Cup. Krishna takes on “Are You Smarter Than a Scientist?” by guessing the most common injuries in professional football. Then we investigate the Norway–England Skycam controversy: did the ball strike a cable, and why did its internal sensor appear not to detect it? We close with the data behind home-field advantage, referee bias, and the natural experiment created by crowdless matches during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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